The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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September 17, 2013

Turning Japanese

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

While on a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, made a pun.
After a short hesitation his interpreter translated the witticism into Japanese. The Japanese audience burst into excessive laughter, which later prompted the President to ask
the interpreter what exactly he had translated. Was his pun really that humorous? The interpreter admitted that, instead of attempting to translate the pun, he had simply said in Japanese: “the President
of the United States has made a pun. Please laugh”.

Here lies a crucial problem in
translation: how do you translate idiom and wordplay? Last night Sandra Smith (Irène Némirovsky's English-language translator) treated us to the anecdote at a Royal Society of Literature talk on translation, chaired by Adam Thirlwell (whose most recent book Multiples,reviewed in this week’s TLS, collates 12 stories, translated in and out of English and 17
other languages by 61 authors). Also in attendance were the writer and francophile, Julian Barnes,
and the novelist, Ali Smith.

Apart from the more obvious challenges of translation
(including whether a translation corrupts the original text), interesting ideas were raised about the dialogue between an
author and translator. How much influence should an author have over their
translation? “I’m just flattered they’re bothering to translate my work in the
first place”, said Ali Smith. But all agreed that a good
translator taps into a country’s culture, adapting the author’s style to allow the work to resonate in the new language.

Translations are part of a text's afterlife; just as a reader’s interpretation is an ongoing process, no particular translation can ever be ultimate and complete (texts ought to
be translated at least every 50 years as readers and languages evolve, it was agreed). Ali Smith referred us to Muriel Spark’s poem, “Authors’ Ghosts” (2004), in which the
speaker suggests that dead authors “creep back / Nightly to haunt the sleeping
shelves / And find the books they wrote” and “put final, semi-final touches, /
Sometimes whole paragraphs . . . How otherwise / Explain the fact that maybe
after years / have passed, the reader / Picks up the book – But was it like
that? / I don’t remember this”.

Thirlwell talked about the
first time his novel Politics (2003) was
translated into Swedish. The translator asked him about specific words, such as
his use of “grandmother” – did he mean the character’s maternal or paternal grandmother? There are precise words for both in Swedish, but Thirlwell had no idea. He thought about it and gave an answer. And so his novel became more realized in its Swedish version.

The title of a book often poses the
most difficult challenge for a translator. Ali Smith’s recent novel There but for the (2011) has proven especially
hard. And so she allowed her translators to drift away
from a too literal translation of her words. It seems there are no rigid rules for translation.
After all, as Julian Barnes forcefully argued towards the end, you would never give Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
the title Mrs Bovary in its English incarnation.

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This reminds me of the story of this dane in the 19th century that knew some inuit, and lived with inuits, and wanted to translate the Bible to inuit, but when he came to the word "rejoice", being happy, he didn´t know the word. So he saw some happy, rejoicing dogs and asked the inuits what the word for that state was and they told him... That´s why it read in this inuit Bible "and when the Angels heard this they all wagged their tails"...